The Stray Reader

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Author:	B.Y. Simpson
Genre(s):	➡️ Sci-Fi ➡️ Dystopian ➡️ Young Adult
Series? Series Order: Series Title: Can it be read as a standalone?	✅ Yes Book 1 Rageblight Duology ✅ Yes
Goodreads Rating:	⭐ 4 (23 ratings; 22 reviews)
Personal Rating:	⭐ 2 / 5 Overall

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🛑 Spoiler Warning 🛑

I might be recounting events, characters, and themes so THIS MIGHT BE FULL OF SPOILERS.

If you’d like to read a review with the spoilers hidden, kindly scroll to the bottom to read my spoiler-free review in the ‘Recommendations’ section or head to my Goodreads post. You don’t need an account to read it. 🙂

BLURB

Few resources. Limited time. One girl to change everything.

In a world that nears human extinction lies a place called Ashville, where the government formed the World Inhabitance Group to save their people. The Group initiated a plan: assign each eighteen-year-old a death date. Each mistake costs you time. Every move is watched. And only the select are immune to the rules.

For seventeen-year-old Nova James that’s the way it’s always been. But when a rebellion forms and her city is destroyed, Nova is forced to do a forbidden task: seek answers outside the city walls.

She’s on the run, but she’s not alone. Alex, a mysterious boy, joins her cause. Along the way, they discover a government secret so sinister, they may not survive. And the farther they go, the more they confirm the truth…in this world, it kills to be less than perfect.

Please note: Death Date (Chapters 1-40) first appeared in the Kindle Vella Program under the same name.

🌟Review (2/5) 🌟

Good concept but the execution could be better. Everything feels too surface-level.

World Building

The majority of the world-building aspects of this story are in the beginning. It started out well with the description of the death dates, the atmosphere that separates Nova’s privileged upbringing as she blends in at school, the heavy military presence, the explanation of the mirrors, and the mystery of the deaths. However, after that, you’re left with generic dystopian locations one after another that, although provide a logical pattern, aren’t really tethered well enough to immerse yourself truly in that world.

For example, when Nova gets to school we’re supposed to feel like this is the new world order now: death keepers (military personnel) are all over the school and children are lining up on mirrors to get judged and receive a color. But even after knowing the full story behind that, that aspect of the world-building doesn’t really play into anything big to any of the character’s story. I would think it would create this facade of peace and order to get the masses in line but the death keepers causing these early deaths in public spaces and the later mass shooting orders contradict that.

Another example is the hospital Nova ends up at. Sure, there’s population control but how did things get so bad that they have limited staff and a scarcity of medical supplies in a hospital that you apparently need to go through a rough neighborhood to get to? How does having a death date suddenly make people immune to naturally occurring diseases and accidents? Plus, I would think they’d want that hospital nearer to the privileged folks with standard service, no? It just made Nova and Alex’s meeting inevitable and the following hardships necessary. In this case, the world-building isn’t for the reader’s immersion but just to push the plot along.

The other small-world expositions sprinkled in just have weird placements.

For example, about 67% of there’s this new concept introduced about IDs having trackers and Alex losing days of his life when he distanced himself from it. I found it so out of nowhere considering it didn’t really play a big part of the story after that part. Besides, if that was the case, why was Nova allowed not to have one for so long? She’s still attending school and facing the mirrors just like everybody else, it was established that everyone knows she’s related to a government official, and her anomaly of not being affected by the enhancement drug makes her stick out to the death keepers… so why is she able to fly under this radar for so long?

Another one is when Alex tells Nova the story of how he witnessed his father and his sister’s deaths. So there are areas that he wasn’t allowed to go to. Why? His sister was there with his father. Why wasn’t he allowed to go to that area? And they were ‘executed’ in public too!

In summary, I feel like the world-building did not go as deep as I wish it had. I think the tricky thing about dystopian books is that you constantly have to walk a line between it being a believable alternate or future version of the state of the world we live in and yet different enough for it to feel like its own entity. I could feel that attempt at the beginning and in between switching locations but that was the problem – each location felt separate from the other and nothing but the generic knowledge that it was a dystopian sci-fi novel tied them together.

Plot

Keeping with the theme of almost everything in this story feels surface-level, the execution of the plot is really in the same vein. In theory, the plot elements of this book should’ve worked. That’s what hooked me in the first place. We have a society where an organization that controls the population emerges. We have a strange string of deaths pointing to a corrupt and/or evil governing body. We have a main character who shows signs of home trouble, with strong convictions on her principles that go against the norm, and is being pointed at to be someone special. Her world turns upside down as she finds herself caught in a resistance and she’s given a reason to start a journey. However, again, these are all great individual puzzle pieces that just didn’t piece together seamlessly.

I have more questions the more I progress.

• First of all, why was the whole Graham traitor plotline necessary? If the grandfather wanted to monitor Nova, he should’ve done it from the moment he injected her and not a decade later. Also, Graham was such a terrible traitor. He was straight up taking notes in front of Nova and left that notebook so out in the open that both Nova AND her mother discovered it at different points in the story.
• If Nova was already immune and was destined to be a death keeper, how could she have gone throughout her life undetected? The grandfather gave an excuse that anyone lower than 18 was too risky to report, sure, but I would think the government would at least keep tabs on these people, no? Nova’s generation already grew up with mirrors who scan them every day. Otherwise, it would be commonplace for people of 18 and above to suddenly get shipped to death keepers camps and that opens up a whole can of worms because no one was supposed to know this while immunity business.
• Don’t the death keepers know they’re immune to the rageblight? They seem to do so because one of them just blatantly told Nova and Alex ‘Rageblight was taking you out way before we did,’ which they were not supposed to reveal but hey that’s that. But then why do the death keepers in the beginning of the book talk about Nova’s condition as something unusual? Nova caught them saying it’s weird that she isn’t getting affected by the injections and how it pisses one of them off. Did… did logic not apply to this?
• The radio was given so much importance but it really didn’t end up being anything valuable. If it was meant to validate the existence of the rebellion it did its part during the meeting and there was no reason to protect it any further other than to give Nova some sort of character to connect with her best friend. But that really didn’t work for me either. I’ll explain why that is in the characters section below. It had the magical ability to survive being submerged in water yet unusable for the most part because they couldn’t even use it to talk to the people on the other end. It got destroyed midstory without even giving any hints as to where Alex will go to find them after the ending. So much for Olivia telling Nova to ‘be the girl with the radio.’
• So the death keepers find a group of people meeting past curfew and are suspicious that they’re part of a rebel alliance but just let them go without consequences other than injecting them with more rageblight and let them go about their day? Why aren’t they being punished for rebellion, or being taken in for questioning? Weren’t their whole schtick was being feared? It just doesn’t make sense. Even if the rebels were going to die eventually, there’s still a need to show their brutality. At the very least, do some intel gathering about the rebels!
• Lastly, my main problem with it all – Nova isn’t as special as she was raised to be. Based on the fact that there’s actually a cure for the rageblight and there are many cured that death keepers are able to be everywhere and in overwhelming numbers, then her being immune isn’t special at all. I was already eye-rolling so hard when she and Alex started talking about this journey as some mission to save the world when they were never part of the rebel alliance and they had no plan of their own other than to follow grandfather’s orders, but that realization at the end just made it all so disappointing and even more frustrating. Like they’re really here, teenagers, with such big egos to think that they’re the keys to saving the world without having a substantial basis to think so! There was that opportunity if Nova had actually started spying on her grandfather but that never happened. She was kept in the dark until the end.

Sorry, I’m getting too worked up now. In short, there are just too many conflicts and inconsistencies. To be fair, there is a sequel. Maybe the questions will be answered there but it still doesn’t remove the frustration that the whole plot in this book is incohesive and shallow.

Characters

The characters, I felt like, are all over the place. Their personalities, dialogue, actions, motivations. They feel like these aspects of themselves have been emulated by stereotypical YA dystopian characters and they manifest depending on what the plot and the scene call for.

Nova, for example, was supposed to be tormented by her mother’s way of upbringing. But she never really, seriously, struggled about this enough to affect anything she did in the book. At most what it did was encourage her to leave home and start this whole journey, which again was just significant to the plot but not to her personality. Her two personal motivations for embarking on this truth-seeking journey were her brother and her best friend. However, first, her relationship with her brother was not really in the spotlight. Second, she had more disagreement and distrust scenes with her best friend Olivia than an actual show of camaraderie. Nova was upset that Olivia didn’t trust her enough to include her and vouch for her at the rebels’ meeting but somehow, in that same location, Olivia says to her, “…Listen to the people begging for their life and figure this shit out before we all die.” So again, Olivia was just a plot device to tell her she’s the chosen one for some baseless reason and for Nova to care about the useless radio. Even towards the end of their conversation after Graham was shot and their lives were in danger, Olivia’s only reaction was to suspect why the death keepers ignored Nova instead of, I don’t know, showing worry that Graham was shot and her best friend was in danger? If she lived long enough to be a traitor this would’ve made sense but she didn’t. Lastly, her relationship with her grandfather was a huge thing yet she was so quick to sell him out! At 20% in, she says yes to spying on him despite having a supposedly strong relationship with him because she trusted him more than she trusted her own father for 13 years!

Everyone else is just character cocoons of their stereotypical YA dystopian counterpart.

Graham is your typical red herring prince – the perfect partner who turns out to be one of the bad guys. The problem with his arc is that he wasn’t shown enough internal conflict to make him a substantial character. He said he cared for Nova and her grandfather only approached him later in the relationship as it made the most sense so why was he so quick to sell her out over a cure? Even if it was about death, at least show some struggle that this is against his principle as a good guy. He wasn’t apologetic or anything like he really didn’t care enough about Nova at all which doesn’t line up. In fact, after everything Nova went through to get to the hospital for him and save him, Nova dropped him so quickly too! There’s no struggle here; just plotlines that needed to move along.

Alex is your bad boy love interest which, for unexplainable reasons other than love at first sight, got attached to Nova too quickly. Not even hours later when he met her and they were cornered by his ex-gang, he told the gang that the reason he left was because they left him hanging but worse because they went after Nova despite ordering them not to. Why is that worse?! He just met her! In fact, in this whole scene, Nova’s importance is once again overestimated as the new leader harms Nova and says ‘You’ve messed everything up!’ Why? They already left Alex hanging before Nova came into the picture just hours ago! Sorry, back to Alex. He’s just a walking contradiction. He says his walls are up but he caves in and trusts Nova too quickly, swears his protection without anything in exchange, and is supposedly a 19-year-old who would suddenly talk like an old man at random times in a conversation. What 19-year-old contemporary guy suddenly spouts ‘Blood has already been spilled. Red seeps into our soil.’? It’s just so uncharacteristic of him. But to be fair, this isn’t just him. Characters throughout the story randomly say some deep lines that are inserted in really weird conversations.

Okay, I have so much more to say about the other characters but the core of it is just the same – flimsy personalities, weird dialogue placements, and all catering around Nova’s journey.

Recommendation

To be honest, this wasn’t the book for me. I had too many questions and frustrations about the plot, I wasn’t invested in any of the characters due to the lack of depth and awkward dialogues, and there weren’t any real and satisfying consequences for the ‘villains.’ But the main conflict of the story still holds up after the first book so there’s a possibility that reading this plus its sequel can be a good experience.

I would recommend this to readers looking for a YA dystopian sci-fi read that’s not into too heavy world-building. The plot’s premise is intriguing and the plot moves quickly. Each location creates a distinct atmosphere and it’s centered more around the action rather than the romance.

If you’re interested, check it out on Amazon. It’s currently free for Kindle Unlimited users.